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Warner Bros Hiring Students As Online Piracy Spies

Want to get a start in the glamorous world of the entertainment industry? Warner Bros has just the vacancy, as long you don’t mind snooping out online piracy.

Warner Bros Entertainment UK is currently advertising one-year student internships that involve, among other duties, posing as a regular member of downloading communities in order to keep an eye on illegal activity.

The job description, uncovered by TorrentFreak, lists a number of interesting duties including: “Monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated Warner Bros and NBC Universal content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities”.

Aimed at students studying computing degrees, the internship also requires successful candidates to carry out tasks like “Performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results” and “Maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system”.

While entertainment companies have actively monitored piracy online since the days of the original Napster a decade ago, it’s interesting to see them recruiting students. From our experience, cash-strapped students are often tempted into piracy, so these interns will be likely to be spying on their peers.

Still, those willing to take the risk of being snubbed by coursemates will be well-rewarded – Warner Bros is offering a £17,500 salary. That’s pretty good for an internship. Although it might sound like dirty work, we think it could actually be quite an interesting job.

Martin Bryant was Editor-at-Large at The Next Web. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new. You can find him on Twitter, on Snapchat as Martinsfp, subscribe to him on Facebook and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.